Human-machine interaction during vehicle driving is an important technical issue. Today, portable electronic devices like mobile phones becomes more and more popular the gateway for this interaction by playing two distinct roles at a time: with the help of various navigation apps downloading on-line maps and real-time traffic data base, it acts as the navigation assistant for the driver while it remains the access point for the same driver to the IM apps where he/she communicates with the correspondents and receives notifications. A long existing problem for this usage is that interactions with the mobile phone attract the attention of the driver which need to be highly concentrated on road, and this conflict gets worse when the driver need to adjust the navigation destination/choice according to its communication on IM apps. As a result, most drivers have the need and/or experience of manually operating the mobile phone while driving or waiting for a green light, which poses great security risk. Although many countries have established laws that prohibit this type of behavior, due to its inherent needs, such behavior is very difficult to be completely avoided and sometimes can cause serious accidents.
On this issue, various were proposed to reduce or eliminate driver's manual operations on mobile phone, most of them consisting of providing voice control functionality instead. Existing solutions are mainly divided into two types. The first solution is to embed hardware that supports large-screen display and voice commands (such as big screen in a Tesla car) in a vehicle to reduce user's manual operation of the mobile phone. However, such configuration often cannot provide as many various functionalities and convenience as driver's own mobile phone does, which does not solve the fundamental problem. The second solution is to provide a stand-alone device that supporting voice recognition (for example, FEIYU in-car voice assistant manufactured by iFlytek) to allow voice control of some operations of the mobile phone or the car. Nevertheless, its cost remains considerable due to the necessity of embedded high-performance processor and/or communication module for the voice recognition, and a stand-alone device requires a dedicate power supply for itself, not always available in the vehicle.
Further, besides driving scenario, there are other occasions that users would like to control the mobile phone or devices by voice commands and/or to record human speakers' speech or conversation by processed audio file or by text generated by voice recognition, for example, when cooking in a kitchen, when both hands are tied up doing activities other than operating the phone, etc.
The disclosed method and system are directed to solve one or more problems set forth above and other problems.